Reuters began the rumors early last month when it cited analysts as saying that Verizon was likely to ditch the unlimited option and switch to a tiered pricing scheme. Now Engadget is claiming that this prediction was correct and that its sources say that a tiered pricing scheme will likely land by July 29.

The report says that the pricing scheme will likely be around that offered by AT&T ($25 for 2GB, $15 for 200MB). That would mean that Verizon users would ultimately be paying more per MB than they are currently.

All indications are that T-Mobile and Sprint, though, have no intentions of following Verizon and AT&T into the world of capped connections. Sprint is instead opting to charge users a small premium ($10) on its 4G connections -- T-Mobile may adopt that alternative approach as well.

Will customers embrace AT&T and Verizon's tiered, capped data plans? Or will they rebel and jump to Sprint and Verizon and agree to pay a nominal fee if they want their data to be transferred at faster rates? Only time will tell, but it should be interesting to watch for whether Verizon officially airs a tiered smart phone data scheme.

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I'm with you on the unlimited plans advertising things, as it appears to be in the USA. I'm not sure how things are handled in the states though, but for a while now a lot of mobile phone services have been advertised as unlimited for a while with regard to text messages as well as data plans, in the UK.

For the most part, people have come to terms with the notion of it being essentially unlimited for the vast majority of people, but fair usage terms apply. This was something that we went through over here in the UK a while ago with people moaning about unlimited being limited, but when you think about it, it is a ridiculous notion that doesn't make much sense really to expect to be true, but it is still a bit naughty, and just marketing departments doing there thing.

In the end, they (were kinda forced to) make it pretty clear what the fair usage limits on "unlimited" are, and that seems to be pretty transparent, in the grand scheme of things. There are a lot of words that marketing departments get away with abusing, like "free" and such, which we all know doesn't exist really, there is always a price to be paid.